I really enjoy listening whenever Merlin Mann talks about blogging. Because even with Merlin's hate of pointless productivity blogs, and of all the crappy things people do with social media, when he talks about blogging you still get a sense that it's something he thinks is worth doing, and that it's worth doing well.

Merlin's insights into blogging are usually prefaced by 10 minute long admissions that "this is going to sound really douchey." The funny thing about that always is that the more time he spends telling you how douchey what he's about to tell you is going to be, the more likely it is what he's about to tell you will cut straight through the bullshit and reveal really enlightened principles that stick with you.

In some of his talks, his system for rewarding blogging is roughly:

1. Find your passion
2. Find your voice
3. Blog the shit out of the two.

It took me a long time to find the passion part about what I wanted to blog about when I had my last job, but afterwards I lost interest in it quickly. One approach I've been adopting lately is to blog about my ideas.

Instead of focusing on blogging about a passion, the only other topic I've been able to think of is to focus on all of the ideas I have, and the interesting things that get me thinking.

If you could ever consider blogging about your passion (say, marketing) as a way to increase your knowledge, improve your thinking, and grow your confidence in a topic, then using the same method to reflect through the things that are occupying your mind should work equally as well.

... Or it could be because Merlin gets paid to talk about blogging.

Hmm...

John Gruber & Merlin Mann's Blogging Panel at SxSW: http://www.merlinmann.com/media/2009/3/14/audio-john-gruber-merlin-manns-blog...
How to Blog: http://www.merlinmann.com/media/2008/9/15/video-how-to-blog.html

Competitors always show you the more features their products have compared to Apple's. Take the Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet they are announcing in September. They flood the video with lists of features the product has. But will Samsung ever go on stage and say as a company, that they took more care in making the product than Apple did the iPad? That they paid more attention to the details that will affect users?

To be honest, the dark and robotic teaser promo for the Samsung Galaxy Tab makes it seem like these guys are competing more against Droid, another android phone, rather than against Apple. Compare this with one of the commercials for the BlackBerry Torch which are very Apple-esque (there's one with the Torch sitting on the table doing very iPhone like things).

Why is Apple the only company to say that we’re going to ship less features because it’ll make a better product?

You’d think that it would eventually become just a numbers game. If Apple does the “more design, less features” thing with their products, and they constantly are being mimic’d by a half dozen competitors every 6 months *and* they still manage to grow and gain share... Wouldn’t at least one other company eventually catch on and try to do the same?

Yet every competitor competes on the more features play over and over again.

I said it a year ago on this blog that the best companies constantly smoke their competition with only two things:

1. Great Products
2. Great Care

Not all the Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube campaigns in the world will make up for that.

Apple's Attention to Detail: http://floodlite.tumblr.com/post/1011047822/apples-attention-to-detail
Feature checklist dysfunction: http://www.marco.org/380868888
Samsung Galaxy Tab: http://galaxytab.samsungmobile.com/

- Foursquare
- Friendfeed
- Posterous
- Tumblr
- Twitter

I was thinking today that the only thing I really remember people complaining about was that they were completely overwhelmed with none of this stuff, but with their RSS.

RSS?

While RSS has maybe never been the easiest to manage, it's so mature now that the ways to control and not feel overwhelmed by it have been around for years. The need to check RSS constantly is much less than the more social updates of your close friends on these other networks, and there’s no social price to pay if you delete particular websites from your RSS feed.

Compare the the list of social networks to RSS and the one difference that stands out is that the following mechanism of the social networks are all built into the networks, while RSS is a standard that people use tools to subscribe to and manage. Decentralized social graphs have been talked about by open software groups since the dawning of Facebook, but it's still the unified networks that pair utility and networking together that have been growing, with decentralized methods still in the experimentation phase.

This got me thinking about what it is about social networks that encourage us to overwhelm ourselves with information, and what at the same time makes all the content in our RSS the stuff that’s "overwhelming".

One thing that comes to mind is that our tolerance for extra information is probably higher when we attach a higher social value to information that comes from social connections. It's this same reason why I avoid unfollowing or unfriending people unless I think I have to, and why I look at RSS and I think of it more as "news" (unsocial, but valuable information) than as "updates" (social, and potential not valuable at all).

On the other hand, connections on Facebook (before, when I used to be on it) were equally unmanageable on the whole because of the richness of all the information connections were sharing with me.

Here’s this idea crudely sketched.

Click here to download:

idea.pdf (71 KB)

Something I wonder is if Facebook brings together what these services all do individually, blending status, location, blogging, photos, links, then we move further to the right of the graph. Right now each service works well on its own and stays manageable because the information we get is specific and hits that sweet spot. If we were to blend it all together would it end up becoming overwhelming and force us to move back down the graph?

At the very last meal of our latest cottage weekend before our car ride back to Toronto, @joshdavey challenged us and forced us to admit if we got value out of Twitter anymore. We started discussing the Buzz Kill story that Leo Laporte published and how for us yelling in a room full of other people yelling had become a habit that we all unknowingly found ourselves in as we started gaining larger twitter audiences.

The most important part about the conversation we were having was it’s small nature. What was expressed was a constant frustration at observing the way people we know behave in ways online that were misaligned with their behaviours when we talk to them in person.

We were all victims of being forced to shift our conversational patterns, from tight conversation, to loose conversation, and into broadcasting as our maturity on social networks matured. Eventually we started to seek out more networks to find places to have tight conversations. It worked for a period of time, but they all expanded eventually

Every network is like this because every network has mechanisms and incentives to increase your connectedness to other users. There’s no social network that rewards small networks among users.

One reason I think we keep finding ourselves in broadcast situations is that most of the different networks we join are all open. I’ve already been experimenting with private blogs over the past year as a way to keep communications tight among a close circle of friends, but what I found out though was that the effort blogging requires compared to Twitter in a public setting carries over and still makes it an inaccessible medium for those who with different workflows.

More recently we’ve started experimenting with a private group on status.net. The purpose of starting a private group isn’t to have a place to express ideas that are inappropriate to share publicly, instead it’s a mechanism to keep the group controlled and small, and to replicate the ways regular conversation work. There’s almost no danger of a tweet being shared, emailed, or scraped by a social media monitoring service.

It’s also fundamentally about letting the opportunity for tight conversations to happen more frequently. And on top of that, along the conversation spectrum of broadcasting, loose conversation, tight conversation, there’s finally no conversation, but personal introspection. What I think we are enabling ourselves to do by backing off from a shouting-room only environment is to reduce our investment in broadcasting (especially given the potential wasteful nature of investing in those messages like Leo Laporte will tell you) and reinvesting those resources into what is potentially more valuable.

@joshdavey: http://twitter.com/joshdavey
Buzz Kill: http://leoville.com/buzz-kill
Status.net: http://status.net/ 

Apps that give us new ways to create, share, consume, and organize seem all elicit different levels of excitement.

Some apps, like Pulse, even give users the tools to all four of these activities. They can organize their news feeds, they can consume them in a rich way, they can share the articles they find that they like, and even create a website with all those shared stories.

A new app to read RSS feeds or look at our Twitter stream can change “consumption” of media and has an impact on advertising, on mainstream media, on the print industry as a whole. Then, a new application that makes organizing and writing and accessing documents device agnostic, and fully cloud synced, gets little attention in comparison.

When an app like Flipboard hits the scene then it disrupts where people go to read content, where they get their content from, and what they can do with their content. A neat example of sharing on Flipboard is how their article “comments” are all integrated with users’ Twitter accounts.

A consumption app is going to do different things than a tool for writing. In fact, you already know what an app for consumption is going to do, who knows what people might do with a tool for creating?

Pulse: http://www.alphonsolabs.com/
Elements: http://www.secondgearsoftware.com/elements/
Flipboard: http://www.flipboard.com/

The short version is that a blended branded, and curated stream could be a premium source of content on top of Flipboard’s free mechanically scrapped content streams. Many of these could exist, created and run by brands, by individuals, or by communities. It’s a need for more content that feels the same way that browsing the currently available Hacker News or Cool Hunting streams do, in how they’re more enjoyable to read because they each represent a single community. This creating a binding thread between all the content in those streams. It’s why your Twitter stream feels familiar because you know that while all the content and links point to different sites and come from different people, they all relate to your Twitter account.

It’s the blending of the many (many articles, many links, many different websites), underneath a common thread that elevates the experience to more than just browsing links.

The "everyday use" that revealed this aspect about Flipboard was not in the sense of using the application everyday for the first week that it came out, but instead it was by using the application as I went about my everyday life. That everyday use included being able find interesting content when the need arose if wanted to take a break from work, or in the morning when drinking coffee, looking for something interesting to start my day off with. I usually started with nothing more than the topic I want to browse, like technology or design, and then with every swipe of the app’s pages I was given something new and unpredictable, not knowing what the layout of the next page would be, or what images and graphics would be displayed.

What I first started to notice and appreciate was that the source of the content came secondary in importance to the content itself. There was a small 25x25 pixel favicon with the site’s name beside it. Beyond that it felt like all content was treaty equally.
Getting rid of the distinction of whether a piece of content was coming from a blog, a magazine, or a news site was refreshing. And on top of putting these different types of content side-by-side, Flipboard also made content more distinctive by curing the common symptom known as "Fucking Ugly Websites." Flipboard gave me a universally clean and consistent design to absorb article headlines.

In general I like the experience of discovering content through the Flipboard interface enough to pay for it, with certain conditions. A Flipboard stream worth paying for would need to change in a couple ways. The first change needed for me to pay involves giving me more than only scrapped web content. Topics right now are only made up articles scrapped from specific sites, and like I mentioned before, smarter, curated streams would be incredible.

This sort of curation shouldn’t just involve putting content through a human filter, but also involve giving a Flipboard stream the unique characteristics of a creative and thinking mind. What would really be worth paying for, and what could create loyal users would be a selection of streams, each one containing a blend of articles that are relevant and that draw you in, with each stream supplementing it’s curated content with unique premium content that only appears in that stream. Think, Daring Fireball on Flipboard.

So far Flipboard is refreshing because it obfuscates the original source of a piece of content and let’s me not worry about ugly website. In each case it lets me focus on what matters. What would be great to see in the future, and what I would pay for, is a Flipboard that could bring disparate content together on a more meaningful level, and letting me know that in any one stream, every piece of content is related, bringing the big picture into play. This would help take the application from interesting, to relevant.

I read lot, take a lot of notes, and draw many sketches. The problem is I always forget a lot. I don’t know why it happens, but the fact that I can’t directly recall 95% of what I just studied in university makes me worried... about the possibility of in the future forgetting things I actually care about (aka I don’t miss the school stuff much).

Overtime I started to experiment with different behaviours that would help me better retain the key ideas of what I read. I tried bookmarking pages with Post-its, and I tried vigorously taking notes on everything I thought was worth remembering, but neither method helped me much. Though I did learn what I was actually trying to achieve, and it wasn’t to remember the key ideas at all. It was to become a better product of them.

If someone else was writing this you could paraphrase that as “Not better understanding what makes a better entrepreneur, but actually becoming one”, or designer, or hacker, etc...

The funny thing about it is though, that at the start of a project, no matter how much preparation I do in trying to understand an idea, it only ever feels like it’s through the process of writing code, or designing, or in tackling all the little problems that come up (and sometimes there are larger ones that come up too) when I can feel like I’m moving forward in furthering my understanding.

It may actually be more appropriate to say that it’s in the course of development and of being in that correct mindset, the mindset of developing, and not the mindset of preparing, that I can do stuff like look at my notes, or create new drafts, and actually learn.

All the notes and sketches I do before starting a project, are preparation for the learning I’m about to do.

What does that mean? It’s means reading books is good, but referencing them, discussing them, and dissecting them in the right mindset is more lasting.
Try this. If you’re like me, you may still forget everything you read, but at least maybe the muscle memory will stick with you.

The idea that I get very little from actually reading anything was a scary realization that was revealed itself word-by-word in front of me as I read The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains in Wired by Nicholas Carr.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1